On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove -- to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife -- that the hours of his life belonged to himself alone. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence, yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives -- testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even across multiple generations.